Situated in one coastal city, Dalian, in Northern China, this book reports an ethnographic study of China's emerging “talent markets”—job searching, recruitment, matching employers with prospective employees, and the formation of career paths of young professionals. As China has undergone great transformation in the last three decades, labor markets are arguably one of the areas that were most susceptible to market forces, with the state sector shrinking and higher pay and alternative jobs luring talent into the market sectors.

While the presence of talent markets may seem mundane in market societies, Hoffman examines the rise of such markets in China with a distinctive analytical lens—the so-called “governmentality perspective” (Chapter 1), which develops “an inquiry into how modes of power and normative practices help produce the professional choosing subject” (p. 12). From this perspective, individual choices in job markets, professional values, and norms are not merely manifestations of market mechanisms; rather,...

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